


“Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not”

by Creamteasforever



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: AU, Dark, M/M, Mystery, Remix, angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 07:05:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2058600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Creamteasforever/pseuds/Creamteasforever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is really most sincerely dead. Only John doesn’t believe it. </p>
<p>An AU meld of “The Final Problem” and “The Reichenbach Fall”, with a little something all its own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not”

**Author's Note:**

> The Chubbyjohnlock-requested sequel to “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, which was just a quick and simple Fatlock rewrite of the last night Sherlock and John spend together in “The Final Problem” (a bit like what would happen if Doyle had written everything he ever did in the métier of “The Adventure of the Dying Detective”). This one is a great deal longer and plottier than the original fic: John sets out to solve the mystery of what happened one night at a Swiss waterfall. Moriarty gets involved. And what of the other M overseeing the whole...
> 
> Lots more author’s notes at the end. Enjoy!

“So he’s dead, then,” John said dazedly.

“I’m afraid so,” Mycroft agreed.

It’d been at once too slow and too fast to take in. An hour before the scheduled rendezvous at the top of the Falls, Sherlock had turned to him and asked if he would fetch the police from the nearby town. John resisted the idea, then harangued the detective for a few minutes (“you couldn’t have mentioned this earlier?”), but the man had been adamant; someone had to go and that someone had to be John. If John hadn’t known better, he would have thought Sherlock was second-guessing himself.

By the time he’d hiked into the closest town, nearly an hour had passed already. It was half-past three when John finally made it back, flown in by helicopter. It turned out that someone had tipped off the police ahead of time; they seemed to have been waiting for Sherlock to send word.

And John had been the one to find the note, close to the confused muddle of footsteps that ended at the cliff edge. Sherlock’s pack lay abandoned under a tree, the white paper fluttering from where it’d been pinned to one strap. John couldn’t bring himself to read it at first, passing it to the police detective (another detective? Could the world have such a thing?) and listening to the language with a dull sense of inevitability. 

Moriarty was pointing a gun at his temple, it said, the man was willing to surrender his own life but only if he could bring down the best detective in Europe with him. There were a few sentimental if ostentatiously dignified lines at the end. John had clutched the pack to himself and said nothing.

He was still holding it now, hours later in the overlit glare of a Swiss police station. Mycroft gazed at him with a sympathy that seemed most unnatural on his face.

“They’ve found the bodies. Two of them. There’s no doubt about it, my brother sacrificed his life to make sure Moriarty wouldn’t get away this time.” A cracked note entered his voice. “Sherlock insisted that I not interfere, said that Moriarty would find a way to wiggle out of this given half a chance. I should have sent in the police much sooner.”

“You should have done,” John snapped, though in his heart of hearts he couldn’t blame the man – he couldn’t imagine how bad Mycroft must be feeling about trusting his brother and being proven horribly mistaken. He opened the pack and ran a hand through its contents. “I suppose this is all that’s left of his last moments, then.”

“It’d seem so. I’ve had the place searched most thoroughly, in case of any evidence linked to confederates Moriarty may have had. Nothing else, it seems to have been only the two of them.”

John looked up sharply. “Hang about. They didn’t find anything else at the site?”

“No, nothing. Why?”

“It’s just that we’d switched sleeping bags yesterday, and I don’t know where mine went. Green one. Military issue. It’s not in here, I thought they’d have found it by now.”

Mycroft shrugged. “It may have gone over the falls as well, of course. Now I have to stay put, arrange for the bodies to be shipped back to England and so forth, but I can have you flown home now if you like. An hour’s drive to the airport and you’ll be back in London by morning.”

John thought briefly about asking for a look, but decided not to. He couldn’t bear the idea of viewing his friend’s undoubtedly battered, destroyed corpse.

“I’ll take you up on that plane offer. But if you don’t mind I’ll pass on the bodies, thanks.”

Was that regret on Mycroft’s features? “Very well. I’ll be in touch. Let me know if there’s anything you need. John, I’m very sorry.”

Then he was stumbling outside, and then in the back of a large, softly-padded limousine, and he knew the worst now. He could sit and sleep now; god, he was tired. Sleep. Sleep forever, like Sherlock…

John opened the pack again. A few papers. Spare phones. Currency, falsified passports, some clothes – they still bore the man’s scent, and he wasn’t too proud to bury his face in one of the shirts and breathe it in deeply. But certainly no sleeping bag. Funny how annoying that was: he’d been only too glad to give it to Sherlock for a night, but he’d expected to have it back eventually.

Why would his sleeping bag have gone missing?

He could just hear Sherlock’s voice, dammit, in that familiar crisp baritone. That warm Sunday morning three months ago when there’d been no case on. They’d been good-naturedly quarrelling about nonsense while half-watching football, the Hibs had lost two goals to one. “It’s the same in detection as it is in science or in your own profession, John. How many times have you been puzzled by an illness, only to make a diagnosis on the basis of the one fact that doesn’t fit?”

“Well, fairly often,” he’d admitted. “Yesterday it was a stray remark about an angry cat that did it. Bacteremia had set in, he’d contacted it when the cat bit him a few days before, but the patient was half-dead by the time we’d worked that out.”

“Quite so. It’s often the solitary fact that will not fit, the one that Inspector Lestrade and the other fools at the Yard would happily overlook for the sake of wrapping up a case quickly and moving on, that proves to be key in breaking it open. You cannot bring your own preconceptions to a crime scene, you must rely on the evidence to be found there. Assumptions are fatal.”

Mycroft wouldn’t have said anything he was uncertain about. Mycroft would only mention what he could be confident was the truth. Therefore: the searchers would have found a sleeping bag if it’d been there to be found.

John tried to imagine the bag blowing over the falls, but that didn’t make sense. Sherlock’s pack had been closed, so for that to have happened Sherlock must have opened the pack, taken it out, closed the pack and had his final confrontation, possibly involving a fight, while still holding it. His debonair Sherlock, falling to his death while clutching a battered, comedically oversized green sleeping bag? That was something more than improbable. He briefly considered whether the detective might have tried using it as a parachute, but that was just stupid.

Come to think of it, this whole business about a note didn’t make much sense, did it? Somehow Moriarty had been sentimental enough to allow Holmes to leave a farewell message, but hadn’t cared to leave one of his own. No half-sarcastic, half-mocking apology to Molly, no regretful instruction for a minion? Nothing for the papers? That didn’t sound like the loud, tabloid-loving criminal they’d been dealing with, not a bit of it.

Say, John mused, that it wasn’t a case of murder, but kidnap. Moriarty puts a gun to Sherlock’s head, forces him to write a note announcing his death in the most flamboyant way possible, then fakes a lot of footprints and steals off with the detective before the manhunt starts. That’s much more likely in at least one way. Moriarty’s savouring the publicity and will announce himself again when he’s least expected, and that’s as clear a motive as the man’s ever shown – he gets to kill Sherlock not once but twice.

And if he’d thought of all this, than Mycroft surely had. Except that Mycroft was convinced that Sherlock was dead, despite the numerous logical flaws this whole business presented. In which case, for whatever reason, Mycroft actively didn’t want to look at the discrepancies, even though he’d somehow been masterminding the police in a foreign country, ready to take over as soon as Sherlock was out of the picture…oh god, was Mycroft deliberately looking the other way? Happy to help Sherlock knot and tie the noose, then step back and let Moriarty’s men take him? Maybe that’s why Sherlock had told him to get the police, assuming that his brother was handling their backup and realising only far too late that it wasn’t coming. He, John, didn’t know Mycroft that well. It didn’t seem impossible that the man had coolly traded away his own brother as a quid pro quo, though he wondered what price could have been worth Sherlock – some secret intelligence plans, or the safety of London? Or just ridding himself of a rogue operator whose actions were unpredictable. 

So he couldn’t contact Mycroft about his suspicions. Not a word. Right now he was just poor stupid John, expected to fly back to London and write up a tearful eulogy on his blog; his safety lay only in his perceived stupidity. Suggest you’re anything more than that and you’re liable to get into trouble you can’t get out of, any more than Sherlock could.  
John slumped back against the seat. If Sherlock was in the hands of British intelligence now, there wasn’t much he could do about it. It’d take someone much better trained and more experienced in secret service work to infiltrate that lot. So assume that it’s Moriarty’s men who have him, or you’ll never get anywhere.

Back to the sleeping bag. If Moriarty had arranged a kidnap, then they’d have had to go to ground. That was a good reason for arranging this rendezvous in the middle of nowhere – the uninhabited mountain crevasses and valleys would offer plenty of cover. No one throughout this whole process had been able to give him a good reason why the meeting should take place here – why Switzerland, for heaven’s sake? – but if Moriarty had been expecting to hide, from police who wouldn’t be looking too strenuously once two bodies were found, the terrain would be perfect.

Which would mean several nights of camping out in bitterly cold weather. Sherlock would have worked that out a lot more quickly. He could, just about, imagine Sherlock wheedling Moriarty into letting him bring the bag along as protection from the elements – it’d have made him look a right chump, carrying the unsightly bundle with that coat and that scarf, and he had an idea that Moriarty would have liked the image of a Sherlock who looked like so foolish. But more than that, it was the clue, the fact that didn’t fit. Maybe it’d been meant as a hint for Mycroft, but it’d been delivered now and the man wasn’t listening for whatever reason.

Maybe it’d been left as a hint for him.

John pulled his own rucksack off his back and began consolidating the contents of both packs. His own was filled with practical camping gear, gun and ammunition, which he’d need; Sherlock’s equipment would be key in towns and for crossing national borders, which might be necessary later. Ruthlessly, he repacked anything that wasn’t strictly useful into Sherlock’s bag, though he switched the shirts – the scent would fade soon enough, but they’d fit well enough, and he wanted them.

Which phone to bring, which phone to use – bless. Sherlock had taped reminders to the mobiles, with notes saying “Tapped by M-16”, “Tapped by CIA”, and so forth. These all went into Sherlock’s pack. He found a couple that said “Clean” and took those – he wasn’t convinced they’d be secure, but if he had to get in touch with Lestrade they were the only option he had.

Right then. Time to get out.

He looked out the window at the desolate landscape and asked the driver if they could make a quick stop. The man sighed, evidently unimpressed, but pulled up. John got out of the car, shivering slightly in the wind – how it blew on these mountains – and started walking. Fifty yards away, he paused. He could, after all, be wrong somewhere. He wasn’t a logician like Sherlock. In which case he was about to make a silly mistake that would probably lose him his job, terrify Harry, and do nothing at all to help his very beloved, very dead friend.

Resolutely, he started running.

 

 

“You’ve *lost* him?” Sherlock hissed. It was dark, he was hungry and Mycroft was already using their emergency contact system to tell him that John had gone missing. “You’ve haven’t even been looking after him for a day.”

“It was a mistake, I’ll admit it. He got out of the car on the way to the airport and made a run for it.”

“That’s the oldest dodge in the book. I don’t believe your man fell for that.”

“I had a reliable driver and half a dozen squaddies following in an unmarked vehicle. After he’d shot the fourth one they gave it up as a bad job and let him go. You asked that we look out for Watson, not keep him under armed guard.”

“I told you to make sure he didn’t do anything suicidal.”

“Don’t be idiotic. He could have shot himself four times over in that time, he obviously has somewhere he wants to go and to be. Now the part I need to know, brother mine, is this; where does he go next?”

“I have no idea. Back to throw himself over the Falls, for all I know. Try to post some better men there. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” He clicked off.

Sighing, Sherlock burrowed further into the sleeping bag. Aside from being warm (if slightly too large), pleasant, and slightly John-scented, it’d proved itself useful in yet another way – it was thick enough that he could be confident of operating his two-way wristwatch unseen. Morse via radio wave was a ridiculous way to communicate, but it had the benefit of being fairly secure from Moriarty’s men, though he’d taken the precaution of waiting until they were all asleep. Snored horribly, the lot of them. It was a very odd feeling sharing a tent with two of the greatest criminals in Europe. He wondered what Moran was making of it – Moriarty had his own agenda but he wasn’t convinced that the second-in-command had been informed about the change in plan until the last minute. The man kept giving him sour looks.

Mycroft, evidently, had muffed something. Something bad enough that John had noticed, so it must have been fairly obvious. Perhaps Moriarty had infiltrated the police and bought off John’s driver? Seemed unlikely. If he’d wanted John into the bargain along with Sherlock, he could have just said so.

He sipped some water from a canteen to quiet his hunger pangs. John, then, was acting in the service of a third party, most probably himself. There was a chance that the man was secretly beholden to yet another intelligence, but Mycroft’s background checks really should have ruled that out – there was no point double-checking everything his brother said, especially when it corresponded with his own estimation of John. Something had frightened the old soldier. Something new, some unexpected factor that could hardly be Sherlock’s death.

He’d have to apologise for that, some time.

Groaning, Sherlock recapped the canteen. He was with the only two men who might have worried him as to John’s safety; the doctor was perfectly capable of taking care of himself otherwise. Sooner or later John would make it back to London, that was certain, and after that Mycroft and Lestrade could take over for the ex-soldier’s safety and security. Mycroft would be particularly diligent about that, seeing as he’d failed once before. No need to worry.

He rolled over to go to sleep. John would give up the chase eventually, no doubt. 

 

 

The police had definitely been told not to look too closely, John was positive. This was a case of ineptness that simply screamed of quiet instructions and back-room bribes.

He wasn’t much of a tracker, having not done much of it since Boy Scouts, but once he’d doubled-back to the Falls (staying carefully away from the cliff itself, in case anyone was poking around there) it hadn’t exactly been difficult. The main problem had been distinguishing Sherlock’s group from the police stomping over everything; once he’d picked up on the right trail about half a mile off it was clear as day. Six men – he guessed it was six - making their way through undergrowth were anything but subtle in their passage.

It was difficult, but he forced himself to stop after he was fairly certain of the direction, laying his bedroll well out of sight of the path – a safe bet he had pursuers now, but it’d be a hard job finding just one man laying low in all these woods. He was teetering on the edge of collapse after several hours of hiking that day and needed rest. Sherlock was built for quick sprints, not hours of plodding, and if he had been kidnapped would be going no faster than he was forced to. It’d take a lot of luck but he might, might catch up, if nothing went wrong, and he didn’t fall down a crevasse or break a leg, and they didn’t shoot Sherlock, and if Mycroft didn’t decide to flood the area with soldiers to catch someone who’d shot several of his men, albeit in non-vital places. That muted pursuit did seem to confirm his worst suspicions about the elder Holmes brother.

Stop this, John reminded himself. You’re alive and in one piece. For the moment, so’s Sherlock.

If he was. He wished now that he’d agreed to view the body Mycroft had found. There must have been one. Would he have been able to recognise a faked Sherlock, a corpse decked out with the hair and the green-blue eyes? Maybe. Probably.

But, no. If it’d proved him wrong, if it was undeniably Sherlock, he’d have had to have accepted the man’s death. Unhealthy obsession though this denial might be – unhealthy obsession though it was – he was in no way ready for that.

And there was someone along this path, he was sure. Even if it was just Moriarty and a couple of his lackeys…well, that might be enough. It’d be something. And he still wanted his sleeping bag back.

Wait. He’d gotten something horribly wrong with this logic, hadn’t he? There was absolutely no reason why one of Moriarty’s men couldn’t have taken the bag for himself after offing the man and it all have nothing to do with Sherlock’s death, just the random action of a mercenary who thought he’d like to upgrade his equipment.

Maybe he was like Sherlock after all. Laying out all the deductions so elegantly, only to realise afterwards that he’d gotten something vital completely wrong.

John curled up in the inadequate bedroll – stupid, silly Sherlock, packing eight phones for a camping trip and only a couple of blankets to sleep under – and allowed himself a long, draining cry. His handkerchief was disgustingly sodden by the end, and he had no way to wash it. Pity I’m not back at the Falls now, he thought. I could run it under the water and cleanse it that way.

His stomach hurt with hunger. He forced himself to eat one of his army rations, unappetizing but not more so than any food he could envision right now, and allowed his body’s exhaustion to pull him into a deep slumber.

 

It was the morning of the third day when John walked into Moriaty’s camp. Six guns were cocked on him instantly.

John’s first thought was that it was a pity he’d guessed wrong. He really had thought there were only six men. Moriarty, of course, along with Moran and a couple of hired guns.

His next thought was that the seventh one was Sherlock.

“John?”

“John Watson, I presume. Funny, that. You never mentioned anything about him coming along,” Moriarty said.

“I didn’t know! I honestly didn’t know. Half the point of this whole inane operation was to convince him that I was dead, remember?”

“I want Sherlock,” John said tightly, his own gun trained for a headshot through Moriarty’s brain.

“So do we all, cheeky,” Moriarty said. “That doesn’t mean you can have him. Did you tell anyone you were trailing us?”

“No, this was my personal business. Sherlock’s still dead in the eyes of the world, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“This presents certain possibilities.” He turned to Sherlock. “We could kidnap him too, I suppose. I’m not sure what the point would be, but we’d think of something. Moran could use him for target practice.”

“You can’t just take John out of London for good. He’s got things to do there,” Sherlock protested. He was flinching away from his flatmate’s gaze. “Important things.”

“There’s nothing I have back in London that’s more important than you. Nothing.”

“How nice. The spear-carrier expresses his affections for the leading lady. Sherlock, I don’t object to having him along for the party, but you must get him to put away the gun. A man in a jumper like that has no right to an expression so dour.”

“John,” Sherlock said quietly. “He has a point. Six to one odds is, as you’d put it in a happier mood, a bit not good. Please put it down.”

John sighed, though the gun didn’t budge. “All right. Fine. Two things. Persuade Sherlock that you won’t shoot me the next minute, and tell me where my sleeping bag went.”

“Your sleeping bag?” Moran looked properly bewildered for a moment, before hastily readopting the calm of a professional killer.

“Oh. Er. I brought it with me. You wanted it back? It’s, uh, it’s nice. It’s a little too big, but very warm.”

“He tracked down one of the arch-criminals of the century – the great arch-criminal of the century, if I may be so bold and of course who’s going to stop me, just to get an unimportant personal possession back,” Moriarty commented. “And you get this man to clean eyeballs out of your refrigerator and wash your dirty socks. I’m not so sure that the credit in this relationship is on the right side of the ledger.”

“Yeah, I deduced it,” John said proudly. “It was the one thing that didn’t work at the crime scene. Sherlock left it as a clue, that’s how I knew he wasn’t dead.”

“That wasn’t the idea,” the detective said. “I almost wish it had been, except for it being the part where this whole plan goes completely wrong. No. It wasn’t a clue. You weren’t supposed to be here.”

“Then what the hell did you even take my sleeping bag for, then?”

“I thought you’d given it to me. And I wanted something nice. Something cosy, that reminded me of you.” Sherlock was nearly babbling now. “I missed you.”

John leaned down and carefully placed his gun down in the dirt. “Come over here and say that.”

Sherlock looked hesitantly at the gang of viciously armed criminals.

“Oh, just shut up and snog him already,” Moran said in a bored tone. “It’s not like you two are going anywhere.”

Very, very nervously, keeping a close eye on the various weaponry trained on them both, Sherlock crossed over to where his flatmate was standing. John hugged him. It was, Sherlock thought, a surprisingly brilliant one considering the circumstances. Then he stopped thinking temporarily, as John started doing all sorts of interesting things with his mouth and tongue that really quite, quite defied conscious comprehension. The mercenaries snickered in the background, but he ignored them.

And then suddenly John’s tongue was close to his ear, and saying a word, and the word was “drop”. Which Sherlock did, instinctively, and then yelped involuntarily as a couple of hundred pounds worth of John landed on him protectively and a gun fired mere inches away from his ear. The doctor must have grabbed it as he’d gone down and begun shooting right away.

Then there was nothing but a very loud silence.

“Nice going, Lestrade,” John called. He got off Sherlock, who sat up and groaned at the sight of three entirely too familiar police officers.

“Why, but why, can’t I take a trip even abroad to the Swiss Alps without being plagued by Yarders? I can almost understand Lestrade, but did you really need to bring Donovan and Anderson?”

“Glad to see you, too.” The police inspector strolled up as calmly as though they’d just dropped by his office. “John thought he’d better call in some extra firepower once he was sure there was something worth chasing. I talked Mycroft around into letting us come view the crime scene, then we acquired a vehicle and came in to see was what. John asked if he could go in first. You’re the kind of person who gets people to care about him, Sherlock. Care about him a hell of a lot too much, maybe, but there it is.”

John, checking the bodies, nodded in grim satisfaction. “We’re done. Sherlock, get your kit and let’s go. Someone’s going to find this lot eventually and I’d rather we weren’t here when they do.”

“But you’ve gotten this all completely wrong,” Sherlock said helplessly, as he rummaged through the gear to retrieve the familiar green bundle. “I was supposed to infiltrate Moriarty’s gang from the inside, once they’d taken me back to their base and beaten me up a bit and done their best at brainwashing me into subservience. Major espionage operation. Would have taken years to complete.”

“Freak.” Donovan said affectionately. “Can’t save your life without you whining, can we?”

“I’d been in their company for days and not been shot, and then you come along and cold-bloodedly murder them. You’ve completely ruined everything. I can’t imagine what Mycroft is going to say about this.”

John grinned. “You might be surprised about that.”

“It was all a very cunning plan. Which is now totally in shreds. Wait, so you three were following John all the time, then? So you saw…you saw…”

Anderson shrugged. “Yes, we saw the whole thing. So much for your pose of sociopathy. Nice to know you’re as human as the rest of us.”

"Well, more so, maybe! I didn’t sneak along and cold-bloodedly kill six men, did I?"

"Sherlock," Lestrade said patiently, "we thought you were dead. Every paper in Europe’s got your horrific death and colourful pictures of what’s supposed to be your corpse taking up space on the front page. And then John contacts me out of the blue, begging us to come along and help revenge your foul and most unnatural murder. He’s a doctor. Someone had to make sure he didn’t cock this up."

"Thanks so much. I’m a veteran as well, remember? I’ve had more combat experience than the three of you put together."

Sherlock buried his face in his hands. “I have the worst friends.”

"That’s because you’re as bad as the rest of us," Donovan told him. "Look, I may not like you, but that man there? That man has been responsible for killing more people than any serial killer our department’s ever booked, and there were more of them than us with only surprise on our side. And you know what happens in a stand-off? Ten to one Anderson and I end up dead because Moriarty thinks we’re disposable and irrelevant. I was willing to come along and avenge you, but I’m certainly not going to get myself killed on your behalf."

"I suppose you have a point there," Sherlock said reluctantly. "A small point. A miniscule point, but I can’t fault your reasoning."

"I’m so flattered. Let’s go, we’ve got a jeep a mile away so it’ll be a bit of a walk."

They set off, the three officers walking a decent distance ahead of the newly romantic duo. Sherlock looked at John and said quietly, “This really doesn’t end here, you know.”

"Guessed that. What happens next?"

“We were going to wait out here in this profoundly tedious forest for two more days until the hunt died down and then move out to a base in Serbia, I learned that much at least. I’m going to have to head there now and see if I can, just possibly, learn something more useful before someone unexpectedly shows up and kills everyone who I was hoping to learn from.”

“I’m coming,” John said firmly.

“I would really, really prefer it if you didn’t, but it looks like you do less damage with me than without me.” He stopped and turned for an almost fond look at Moriarty’s corpse, the man’s weird smile now frozen forever. “I had an arch-nemesis, a properly brilliant arch-nemesis and you up and killed him just like that. What am I supposed to do with my life now?”

“I’d swear you’re more offended by that than the murder part. Find some less egotistical criminals to deal with, Sherlock. Not everything is about playing games with your adversaries.”

“Fine. All right. Change of topic. How’d you get the Yarders to come out here unobtrusively, then?”

John looked abashed. “I didn’t, exactly. That was Mycroft. He called me on one of your phones yesterday and explained that he’d had to come up with a plan Q just on my account. He can track your clean phones, by the way, I’m not sure how much use those are.”

“Plan Q? What was that about?”

“He said that since he could tell I was still on the loose and tracking your path fairly steadily that could I please stop, I was mucking up both his and your plans, and I said that whatever plan involved faking your death and running off with Moriarty could go hang. So he said he’d send along some backup, I could go do whatever stupid rescue I had in mind, if we got ourselves killed in the process that was our problem, and please don’t interfere with any of his plans ever again.”

“That hardly seems likely, given that you spend quite a lot of time around me.”

“Yeah. So he’s not going to do any more clever schemes involving you. He said you’d appreciate that.”

Sherlock looked positively gleeful. “John, I could kiss you.”

“Good idea.”

So they did.

A considerable period of time later, when they’d stopped for breath and Lestrade began yelling at them to please hurry it up and start moving away from the crime scene already, they started walking again.  
Sherlock didn’t mind that much.

“You haven’t explained yourself properly yet. My motive might have been ambiguous, but these deductions you made at the crime scene, it sounds like you worked them out with a delightful attention to rational thought.” His eyes sparkled. “I want to hear all about them. Every last scintillating detail. Every link in your chain of logic.”

“Well,” John began. “I started reasoning it out like this…”

Sherlock couldn’t help thinking this was far and away the sexiest thing John had ever done.

 

 

“So they’re not dead,” Mrs. Hudson said, after a pause.

“No. Which is why I must ask you to please keep the rooms exactly as they are now. If I know anything about my brother, he’ll be very upset to come back and find them altered or rented out. I’m prepared to pay a certain extra sum for your trouble, of course.” Mycroft looked around the small kitchen. There were several alterations he could think of to improve the place, up to and including tearing down the wallpaper and replacing all the furnishings, but then nobody had asked for his opinion on the matter, estimable though it would have been.

“I’m hoping that doesn’t involve the eatables. There’s several things in their refrigerator that I can’t tell if they’re meant to be Sherlock’s experiments or simply forgotten leftovers.”

Mycroft repressed a sigh. “As close to unaltered as is reasonable, Mrs. Hudson.”

She turned off the kettle and poured out the water. “It’s very nice to think of those boys being together properly at last, even if they will be away a long time. One lump or two, Mr. Holmes?”

“Three, thank you, and a little extra cream. It won’t be forever. Two to three years maximum. Providing nothing happens to them in the meantime.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll be fine.” She handed him the china. “They’ve got each other.”

Mycroft paused a moment to wonder about that. Did everyone, absolutely everyone, who’d come into contact with Sherlock and John assume they were a couple?

He hadn’t. He’d always gone along with Sherlock’s claim to be a sociopath with no time or interest for love, and then the minute he tried to rely on that fact and give Sherlock a task that relied on this very feature, the man had gone and become hopelessly involved in a passionate relationship. It was tempting to suspect that his brother had done it on purpose.

Mrs. Hudson raised her mug in the air. “To your brother’s happiness. And John’s, too.”

Well. Sometimes you just had to accept that you couldn’t control every variable in the universe. It was a lesson worth remembering, even for him.

He picked up his own. “To Sherlock and John. May they have many years of chasing criminals yet to come.”

“That’s not what I said at all, dear,” Mrs. Hudson said reprovingly.

“I know. Close enough for government work, though, isn’t it?”

 

 

And somewhere off in Serbia, the duo were cuddled up in a bag that was slightly large for one person but turned out to be just about right for two.

“Baron Maupertuis. The worst man in Europe.” Sherlock said sleepily. “Well, now that you’ve killed off the competition anyway.”

"You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?" John murmured. "I killed the murderer on our first case, remember? I’m not a safe man to be around either. Especially not when your life is on the line."

"I’m beginning to realise that."

"Long since time you did." John yawned. Sherlock was a very comfortable pillow. And the bag was delightfully warm and snug.

He closed his eyes for a night of quiet, peaceful dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> While the first fic was just a fluffy scene, for a sequel now I had to think through the mechanics of the scenario and how to reconcile my two leads (the planned Fatlock content didn’t happen; it just wasn’t necessary for the story). The reason that Moffat chucked the whole original story for “The Final Problem” becomes evident when you try to think through that scenario with the BBC Sherlock characters - it’s actually quite difficult to rewrite it in a sensible way. The biggest problem being, of course, there’s no body! And yet Watson takes the note at face value (please do go read the original story if you’ve not yet, or else you won’t appreciate just how much of this is just a matter of clever remixing) and assumes that Sherlock went over the cliff even though there’s no good evidence for this. Resolving this in a semi-coherent fashion took me nearly six thousand words; I can see the problem with doing this on telly. And at that, we still don’t know how Moriarty escaped in BBC canon, if he did, so I hadn’t a parallel to go on at that point.
> 
> To me this says more that Doyle was more concerned to leave himself an out to resurrect Sherlock in case he’d made a mistake about that than he was to write a coherent exit for the detective. Which is sweet, in truth. 
> 
> But having never been a fan of “stupid Watson” characterisation, I found that John kept questioning the mystery earlier and earlier - I initially had an idea of having him go back to London before returning to Switzerland, but it just didn’t work well, and moreover it solved a lot of technical problems this way. Once I’d settled on the mystery plot hook, it was just a matter of writing it all down; my thoughts on plotting could be turned into John’s internal dialogue with surprising consistency. Also, my Mystrade RP has given me a certain appreciation for Mycroft’s motives both good and bad, and how they could be misinterpreted.
> 
> I’m not wholly satisfied with this fic, mind – I hold my long-form fics to higher standards, and there are a few technical problems, seeing as the semi-ironic switch in tone from “dark, logical mystery” to “here comes the cavalry comedy” works only semi-well – but then I did try. And it was good practice for later, better ones.
> 
> Besides, for the first time I tried my hand at Donovan, and that was great fun. Her dialogue practically wrote itself.


End file.
